With this scenario in mind, in this project we are interested in determining what variables explain the popularity of an online news …show more content…
(2005) contended that there are many unique formal characteristics of online news to promote different news selection behaviors, such as the number of prior readers, ratings, and elaborated collaborative filtering recommendations based on closeness on preferences. The authors found that highly rated articles are read longer than articles poorly rated, and online readers prefer articles viewed by either few or many people. A possible explanation for this preference is the individuals’ belief that those articles are recently published and/or unique in their content. Therefore, those articles provide a special experience for readers. According to the distinctiveness theory (Brewer, 1991), people are likely to read unpopular articles due to a desire to stay apart from the …show more content…
(2015) found that, versus average readers, friends of recommenders are more interested in commenting on recommended online news. Further, Liu et al. showed social media recommendations mediate the effect of both structural and content features on the frequency of comments. In addition, since videos, pictures, and a large number of words enhance news attractiveness, readers are more willing to comment on news articles with those features. Moreover, negative news articles produce more comments than positive news because they encourage thinking and discussion about the events presented. Since arguably news articles stimulate readers to express their opinions, those articles boost the frequency of comments. Future-related online news lead readers to express their prognosis. Since readers are more concerned with real-life issues, life-related news articles have more comments. Regarding the thematic, Liu et al. (2015) found that subjective opinions from experts have a positive effect on the number of comments in SciTech and finance news, but those opinions have a negative effect on social